


Concerning Soulmates

by Sanna_Black_Slytherin



Category: Original Work
Genre: Heteronormativity, Soulmates, amatonormativity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 23:21:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13845168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanna_Black_Slytherin/pseuds/Sanna_Black_Slytherin
Summary: The soulmate system is a broken one.





	Concerning Soulmates

**Author's Note:**

> This essay has been on my computer for a while. At the request of a reader, I'm putting it up for the public.

A soulmate sounds fun, right? The idea that there is one specific person who is meant for you and you alone to spend your life with; more often than not, you would enter into a romantic—and probably sexual—relationship with that person, and live a happy life, because you will _understand_ that person on a fundamental level, and be understood in return. There won’t be any problems with your relationship—indeed, before you meet your soulmate, you might not even be interested in a romantic entanglement with a person who isn’t your soulmate[1]. Your relationship will be perfect, and they will always, _always_ , be at your side.

To those, I have but one response: No.

What happens if you are already dating someone, and your relationship is okay and you’re in love, and suddenly, you meet your ‘soulmate’—a complete stranger—and are expected to fall in love with this stranger and just leave the person you’ve been dating for forever and forget about them. What gives? Why should you prioritize a complete stranger over the person you love, simply because life says so? In fairy tales, and in every soulmate story you’ll find, the concept of a soulmate is a soul that corresponds to your own, someone who matches you in every way. The question in those cases is, once again: what if you have a good thing going, and then you meet this stranger who’s supposed to be your soulmate, and, as stated in the previous paragraph, are expected to fall in love with them and just forget the person you’ve been dating for, possibly, a long time, simply because that’s how it’s supposed to work? That hardly seems fair.

Furthermore, suppose that your soulmate is an asshole. That’s bound to happen: some people are assholes, and some of those assholes are bound to be someone’s soulmate. Are you still obliged to love them? Are you obliged to support their decisions, no matter what? What if they were abusive towards you before they knew that they were your soulmate? Is it right to demand of you to just cast aside your personal feelings for the sake of adhering to a system that is, inherently, flawed?

Thirdly, there’s the fact that, in societies where soulmates would be an essential part of life, human nature, and the way that society is structured, dictates that people _would_ discriminate against people dating someone who’s not their soulmate: refusing to give them insurance on the grounds of their partner not being their soulmate, hate crimes… The list goes on. Is that really a society you would want to live in? Our world is bad enough as it is, _hateful_ enough, without adding yet another criterion that people must meet or suffer the consequences of being a social pariah.

Is this really a system we want to espouse? Is this really the kind of thinking we want to perpetuate?

Now, consider this: your soulmate is someone your family would be someone your family wouldn’t approve of. Let us say that you’re homosexual, and your soulmate is of the same sex as you are. Let us say you have their name written on your wrist. You could be outed to your conservative family? That is a dangerous situation, and I don’t need studies to be able to say that the lives of a large percentage of gay kids living with homophobic parents take a turn for the worse when they come out to their parents. I don’t want to delve too much into the specifics, as I know that it’s a sensitive issue to many, but suffice to say that it doesn’t look great for these kids.

Let’s now into the nitty-gritty of soulmates. No system is flawless, and those who believe that there’s such a thing as a perfect system just haven’t examined it closely enough. It’s easy to believe that something is good, as long as it works for you. The people who have to live with the pain that something causes, are the ones to realize its flaws. By that logic, there is no guarantee that everybody would have a soulmate. Maybe there’s been a mistake made somewhere along the way, or maybe there is no person fully compatible with this person. What about those people, destined to live in a world where soulmates are an integral part of life but not have one? It would be like asking a blind person to examine a painting: cruel and unnecessary torture.

More: if it’s possible to have no soulmate, it would be possible to have multiple soulmates. Yes, the system of one-to-one soulmates excludes the possibility of polyamory, but clearly, the system isn’t perfect. How would they be seen? Would they be accepted as part of society, or be doomed to be outcasts? Would they even be _believed_? What would that mean for polyamorous people in general?

Now, consider this: What if you are someone’s soulmate, but they are not yours? What do you do? What if the situation is reversed? How do you react? Do you live as a recluse for the rest of your life? Do you tell your soulmate, and wait for rejection?

And then there’s the question of people who can’t or don’t want to fall in love. Are soulmates romantic, or can they be platonic? Let’s bring a little statistics into this. It has been estimated that roughly 99% of the world’s population is allosexual (feels sexual attraction), and 99% of the world’s population is alloromantic. Even taking into account the fact that asexuals might not be aromantic, and vice versa, that leaves 98% of the population feeling both romantic and sexual attraction. Chances are, you _will_ be expected to be in a romantic relationship, by society and by your soulmate, even if you are asexual and aromantic—which, to around 2% of the population, myself included, would be problematic. If you _are_ aromantic, for example you might find Disney movies, especially the older ones, even reboots, a constant, and annoying, reminder of the kind of society what we live in: the one that enforces the idea of ‘true love’, of romantic entanglements, as the be-all and end-all of life.

There is a lot of discrimination underlying the soulmate concept that people don’t bother to look at because, you know, ‘true love’ and ‘soulmates’ sound perfect no matter how you say it. I don’t have a problem with close relationships, be they platonic or romantic, but I _do_ have a problem with someone enforcing something like destiny over one’s own free will and the right to choose, which is exactly what the soulmate system does.

The soulmate system is a broken one, and not one that we ought to glorify.

Here’s a final thought: if your love is _meant to be_ , decreed by destiny, is your love for that person really a choice you yourself made? Isn’t it something that has been forced upon you? In that case, can you really say that you truly love that person? Adding destiny to the equation reduces love to something lesser than the sum of its parts.

**Author's Note:**

> [1] That leaves you unprepared for the ups and downs of a relationship when you DO find your soulmate, and you might find that you don’t know how to solve problems you might have known how to solve, had you been in a relationship before, but I digress.


End file.
